Mars Curiosity Rover Beams Back First Nighttime, Ultraviolet Photos

The Mars Curiosity Rover has beamed back its first nighttime pictures. It sent one taken while using its white LED lights and another using its ultraviolet LED lights.

It's a milestone and the pictures are pretty cool. But they don't tell us much of anything yet.

"The purpose of acquiring observations under ultraviolet illumination was to look for fluorescent minerals," the rover's Mars Hand Lens Imager (MAHLI) Principal Investigator Ken Edgett said in a statement Thursday. "These data just arrived this morning. The science team is still assessing the observations. If something looked green, yellow, orange or red under the ultraviolet illumination, that'd be a more clear-cut indicator of fluorescence."